Socialist Political Economy with Chinese Characteristics in a New
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2516-1652.htm Socialist Socialist political economy with political Chinese characteristics in a economy new era Yinxing Hong 259 Nanjing University, Nanjing, China Received 18 October 2020 Revised 18 October 2020 Abstract Accepted 18 October 2020 Purpose – The socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics reflects the characteristics of ushering into a new era, and the research object thereof shifts to productive forces. Emancipating and developing productive forces and achieving common prosperity become the main theme. Wealth supersedes value as the fundamental category of economic analysis. Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical system of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics cannot proceed from transcendental theories but is problem-oriented. Leading problems involve development stages and research-level problems. Findings – The economic operation analysis is subject to the goal of optimal allocation of resources with micro-level analysis focused on efficiency and macro-level analysis focused on economic growth and macroeconomic stability also known as economic security. The economic development analysis explores the laws of development and related development concepts in compliance with laws of productive forces. The new development concepts i.e. the innovative coordinated green open and shared development drive the innovation of development theory in political economy. Originality/value – Accordingly, the political economy cannot study the system only, but also needs to study the problems of economic operation and economic development. Therefore, the theoretical system of the political economy tends to encompass three major parts, namely economic system, economic operation and economic development (including foreign economy). The basic economic system analysis needs to understand the relationship between public ownership and non-public ownership, between distribution according to work and factor payments, and between socialism and market economy from the perspective of coexistence theory, thus transforming institutional advantage into governance advantage. Keywords New era, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, Political economy Paper type Research paper Theories originate from practice and guide practice in turn. An important goal of building a theoretical system of the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is to enhance its theoretical guidance, and the prerequisite is to boost the explanatory power of theory for practice. At the National Symposium on the Work of Philosophy and Social Sciences on May 17, 2016, Xi Jinping, the general secretary of CPC Central Committee, pointed out that the study of Chinese philosophy and social sciences should center on what we are doing and tap new material, identify new problems, present new ideas and build new theories from the practice of China’s reform and development. This is the guiding principle of constructing the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics that enjoy theoretical guidance and © Management World. Published in China Political Economy. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non- commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. Originally published in Simplified Chinese in Economic Research Journal. China Political Economy Vol. 3 No. 2, 2020 This article is the phased result of “Research on Basic Theoretical Problems of Economics with pp. 259-277 Chinese Characteristics in the New Era” (18VXK002), a major special research project headed by the Emerald Publishing Limited 2516-1652 author under the National Social Science Fund of China. DOI 10.1108/CPE-10-2020-0017 CPE explanatory power of practice. To establish a systematic economy with Chinese manner, 3,2 Chinese style and Chinese characteristics, we should focus on the following three aspects: First, we should tell Chinese stories and theorize and systemize economic thoughts and ideas that have successfully guided China’s economic development. Second, although political economy is a theoretical discipline, it must serve practical purposes and need to make innovations on research, including the object, levels and methods of research, to reflect the characteristics of entry into a new era. Third, the political economy with Chinese 260 characteristics should be known to the world besides being recognized within China. 1. The object and mainline of research of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics Marxist political economy is a science that analyzes productive forces and production relations, so the object and mainline of research of political economy concern an era. Therefore, the political economy has distinct characteristics of the times. Ever since its founding by Karl Marx, the political economy has enjoyed the features of the times. In the face of capitalism under analysis, its mission is to overturn that society. Therefore, the political economy’s research object is production relations, and its mainline is to reveal that the capitalist production relations hinder the development of productive forces. In the early years of New China (i.e. the People’s Republic of China), in order to solve the issue how socialism defeats capitalism, the political economy still focused on production relations as its object of study in a relatively long period, and its mainline was the superiority of socialist production relations. As a result, the political economy remained the economics of criticism and struggle in a fairly long period. Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978, the Party’s central work has shifted to economic construction, thus starting a new process of constructing socialism with Chinese characteristics. Based on the characteristics of the primary stage of socialism, Deng Xiaoping indicated that “the nature of socialism is to emancipate productive forces, develop productive forces, abolish exploitation, eliminate polarization, and finally achieve common prosperity.” This shows that the socialism with Chinese characteristics has two major goals: emancipating and developing productive forces and achieving common prosperity, which has a decisive impact on the research object and mainline of the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. The socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is a political economy in the new era. The following points shall be noted in determining its research object and mainline: First, close attention needs to be paid to productive forces when it comes to the research object of the socialist political economy. As Karl Marx made clear in The Communist Manifesto, the task after the proletariat seizes power is: “to increase the total quantity of productive forces as quickly as possible” (Marx, 2009a, p. 52). In particular, the reason why Chinese socialism is in the primary stage is that the productivity level fails to reach that of developed capitalist countries. Therefore, at the primary stage of socialism, if the object of political economy does not enter into the field of productive forces, the research scope and field of political economy will narrow and the explanatory power and guiding role for the Chinese economy will lessen, which would make it difficult for the political economy to guide the process of socialism with Chinese characteristics scientifically. Second, what do productive forces under the research of political economy mean? There used to be a long-running popular view in academia that the factors of productive forces are the three simple factors in the process of labor stated by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, which are labor, subject of labor, and means of labor. Now it appears that the defect of this definition is its inability to fully reflect the factors required to boost productive forces. People’s educator Wei (2015) once argued that this three-factor generalization deviates from the relevant Marxist discussion. He put forward a theory of “multiple factors of productive forces” based Socialist on Karl Marx’s idea in Das Kapital that the factors to boost labor productivity include political “average skill degree of workers, development level of science and degree of the application of science in technology, social integration of production process, scale and efficiency of means economy of production, and natural conditions” (Marx, 2004a, p. 53). For the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics, the research on productive forces is focused on the social layer rather than the technical layer. Science, division of labor, management, and natural force are all factors of productive forces. In particular, in the new era, with the progress of science and 261 technology, the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence are gradually integrated into the process of developing productivity. An important task of political economy research is to mobilize all productive forces to develop productivity. Third, what layers do the productive forces in the research of political economy contain? Deng Xiaoping stressed that we cannot